1080p not "best" quality in `youtube-dl -F`

[dolljoints]

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• [0] I've verified and I assure that I'm running youtube-dl 2017.10.01

i am on 2017.09.24, it seems macports hasn't added today's update to its repos yet. (i did run youtube-dl -U and it told me to run macports' update procedure, which itself says everything is up to date. so. there you go.) that's unsurprising given there's been less than 24 hours for them to add it.

however, the question i'm asking about has been the case for at least 2 years, and i see no other raised issues about this, so i doubt this matters too much.

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hi, first off i want to say, i apologise if this has been answered already. i searched the github issues for "1080p", but couldn't find anything actually telling me why this is the case.

i'm curious as to why the automatic detection in youtube-dl -F for the best quality seems to top out at 720p? even when 1080p or higher is available, it insists one of the 720p options is "best".

it seems like this heuristic prefers files that are audio+video together, and all 1080p or higher streams are listed as "video only", even though muxing together formats after download is completely fine and is what youtube-dl actually does in practise anyway.

this strikes me as extra weird because youtube-dl does in fact download the 1080p version with separate audio (then muxes) when you give no flags. maybe this is simply a case of youtube-dl -F's display lagging behind actual behaviour?

i saw someone mention this in 2015 in a stackexchange thread, though that person said you need to specify the 1080p stream to get it to download, so obviously something about this has been changed since then.

thanks in advance for your time and answer c:

[dstftw]

Read what does best actually mean.